Rewinding machines create rolls of retail paper such as point-of-sale (POS) receipts, ATM receipts, lottery tickets, and the like. These rewinding machines traditionally form retail paper rolls on a disposable core such as a plastic or cardboard tube. This core adds to the material cost of the retail paper rolls and the environmental waste associated with disposing them after use of the retail paper roll.
For over a decade attempts have been made to produce coreless retail paper rolls. Such attempts have been met with mixed results. The primary challenge has been that coreless retail paper rolls lack the rigidity or hardness of cored rolls. Specifically, heretofore designed coreless retail paper rolls are “squishy” and easily deform during handling such as shipping of the rolls to a customer. Squished or otherwise deformed rolls do not operate effectively in the retailer's printer.
Because of these issues, only coreless retail paper rolls with relatively small inner diameters have enjoyed much, if any, commercial success. Such rolls are manufactured in manual or semi-automatic settings at relatively slow machine throughput speeds. Moreover, because of their small inner diameters, correspondingly small rewind arbors are needed to produce them. Because the bed rollers used to support these small rewind arbors deflect substantially across long lengths, only relatively short bed rollers and rewind arbors (and hence relatively short incoming paper web widths) can be used. These limitations combine to create a relatively slow and small-volume production operation that is labor intensive. As such, only fairly small batches of relatively small coreless retail paper rolls are produced using current commercially-utilized techniques. Moreover, the coreless retail paper rolls produced by such current techniques are still unacceptably squishy for most high-volume end users. That, coupled with the fact the rolls themselves are small (and as a result require frequent change over), has prevented coreless retail paper rolls from being used in high-volume applications such as large retail stores and grocery stores.